i keep saying i'll have more cogent things to say about this, but till then...

Check out deepad's post, I Didn't Dream of Dragons, a thoughtful, lucid, poignant essay on race and reading fantasy.

Excerpt from my comment:

But here is my problem, and that problem is love. Brought up on a steady diet of white fantasy and British boarding school novels, now, even when I can identify the alienation imposed by them -- these are stories by people who think of me as sub-human -- I still love them. They are still the fabric of my childhood, the patterns of my inner landscape. It's like Stockholm Syndrome.

And I still don't know what to do with that? How does one cope with the politics of desire?